When confronted with a new problem I like to brainstorm possible solutions on paper. Doing this allows me to find other problems that I may otherwise miss. Also, it is a good way to figure out how much processing time a solution may eat up.

This is a fairly simple update but it is an important step towards being able to “poke holes into a mountain“. I have a few more important decisions to make before I can start working on fully destructible environments.

In this post I show off the new terrain generator. It generates various terrain styles by using height-maps which are procedurally generated using a simple perlin noise function. As an added bonus, I have included the source code for the noise function.

Large numbers of voxels can cause the Xbox 360 to run out of memory and crash. To free up memory on large maps I have reduced the rendering distance, added some fog, and added an asynchronous graphics resource loader.

The triangle count optimizations I made in my previous post cause textures to appear stretched. In this post I outline my solution to generating correctly repeated tiles while still using a texture atlas.

In this post I implemented two optimizations to reduce the number of triangles drawn by up to 70%. However, one of these optimizations requires extra draw calls which are just too expensive on the Xbox 360.

After playing several 2d and 3d pixel art style games I have been inspired to create my own pixel art game. The project is codenamed orion for now and I hope to release it on the Xbox indie market place once it is complete.

The Natural Input Math Recognition System (NIMRS) is a natural input system that provides access to matlab through a pen based input device. This tool was developed to provide a broad audience access to currently complex tools, such as matlab and maple, with minimal prior instruction.

Nimbus is a graphics API, with an emphasis on ease of use and high performance 3D rendering. I began working on Nimbus about 2 months ago. Since then Nimbus has grown considerably and I am very happy with the progress so far.

The GPU has become increasingly more attractive as a general purpose computing device, with every new hardware iteration providing significantly greater computational power. As a result, over the past few months I have been exploring and researching several methods for accessing and harnessing the GPU for general non-graphics applications.

Bubble Bound is a casual underwater game where the player takes control of a small underwater bubble. By collecting bubbles from the surrounding environment, the player can change their buoyancy, causing the bubble to rise. The objective is to rise to the surface without popping.